Features » May 29, 2014

Eviction by ‘Rent-a-Cop’

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Tenants’ rights groups have warned that the measures outlined in HB 5395 could take the city back to a time when landlords could remove their renters simply by strewing their belongings across the sidewalk or retaining someone to order them out at gunpoint.

Housing activists in Chicago are sounding the alarm over a proposed state law that they say would effectively privatize the eviction process and erase decades of gains surrounding tenants’ rights. Introduced by Rep. Monique D. Davis (D), who is both a legislator and small-time Chicago landlord, the bill could also prove to be a boon for the Wall Street investors currently making a foray into the rental market.

Though the proposed legislation is before the Illinois General Assembly, it is written only to apply to counties with populations of 3 million or more people; in other words, it would only impact Cook County, Illinois, which encompasses the greater Chicago area.

At present, evictions in Cook County are a civil matter carried out by a specially trained unit within the Sheriff’s office. During the past three decades, largely at the urging of advocates, this unit has begun training deputies in the nuances of tenant law and employing a social worker to consult with elderly or disabled tenants and those with young children. Police typically do not become involved in the process.

By contrast, HB 5395, which passed out of committee this month and is now before the Illinois House of Representatives, would change eviction laws to allow any “peace officer,” including off-duty police in the employ of private security companies or landlords, to remove tenants from their homes. Critics have denounced the idea of “rent-a-cops” unfamiliar with the nuances of tenant law carrying out this procedure.

Under current law, tenants may also file motions to attempt to stay their eviction if, for example, their new apartment is not ready yet, or they have a disability that prevents them from moving in the allotted time. Such motions do not prevent the enforcement of evictions unless they are granted by a judge, but legal advocates say that they can still provide a safeguard against tenants who are being evicted wrongfully. HB 5395 would restrict the number of motions a tenant can file to two, placing what advocates say is an arbitrary limit on a process that self-represented tenants, in particular, often struggle to complete correctly on their first try.

Overall, tenants’ rights groups have warned that the measures outlined in HB 5395 could take the city back to a time when landlords could remove their renters simply by strewing their belongings across the sidewalk or retaining someone to order them out at gunpoint.

Jeremy Bergstrom, senior attorney for the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, says the new law would throw the current eviction system into “chaos.” “The one thing we always stress to all tenants is, ‘Your landlord cannot just hire someone to come and evict you,’” he says. “This would change that.”

Among those vehemently opposing the bill is Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, who has said that having such private parties without special training carry out evictions would be a “nightmare.”

“Evictions are inherently difficult and often tragic—particularly when children and other at-risk populations are involved,” says Cook County Sheriff’s Office Director of Communications Benjamin Breit. “The Cook County Sheriff’s Office is able to provide social services to families that we are ordered to evict because we care about them. … Placing this authority with those that have a financial stake in the process would incur unthinkable consequences.”

Sympathy for the landlord

As first introduced in February, the original version of HB 5395 would have eliminated a standing moratorium on evictions when the weather dips below 15 degrees, earning it the nickname “the Polar Vortex Evictions bill” from critics. Davis, the chief sponsor of the bill, is herself a landlord who grew frustrated during the bitterly cold Chicago winter that the sheriff’s office had not yet evicted one of her tenants. The latest version of the bill has removed the weather provision, as well as a subsequent one that would have required the sheriff’s office to enforce an eviction orderwithin 45 days of its entry. Still, many housing advocates are nevertheless decrying what they see as a moral and political conflict of interest in Davis’ dogged advocacy for the bill. (Illinois law stipulates that legislators asked to take official action on an issue in which they have a personal, family or business interest should “consider the possibility of eliminating the interest creating the conflict situation” or “consider the possibility of abstaining from such official action.” But Illinois is not among the 30 states that prohibit so-called “conflict of interest voting” by state legislators.)

Reached by In These Times, Davis says that HB 5395 is not about enforcing evictions against people with disabilities or parents of small children, who critics fear would suffer most under the new provisions limiting the number of motions that can be filed. Instead, she says, “This bill is for those groups of people who have the belief that they don’t have to pay rent when they’ve rented an apartment. This is to give some relief to landlords who are having situations in which a tenant files motion after motion to delay the inevitable.”

Bergstrom, meanwhile, believes such concern is exaggerated. “There’s a perception that it takes a long time to evict people in Chicago. The lawyers who I talk to … believe it’s more a perception than a reality,” he says. “The sheriff got behind this winter, but I think that’s evidence of why the sheriff needs to have some discretion. It was a record cold winter.”

Asked whether the bill constituted a conflict of interest, Davis says, “I also pay a light bill. Should I not vote on [legislative] utility bills?”

Davis declined to state how many buildings she rents out in Chicago, but an In These Times search of public records found that she owns at least five. In a review of eviction proceedings initiated by Davis last year, In These Times discovered one case in which a tenant on the city’s South Side alleged before a judge that Davis had changed the locks and had her car towed off of the property in November 2013 before her eviction had been carried out. If true, this action would constitute an illegal lock-out under Chicago’s Residential Landlord Tenant Ordinance, according to attorney Kelli Dudley, director of the Resistance Legal Clinic. The tenant had filed a motion the previous month to stay her eviction in order to give her and her 8-year-old daughter more time to move; according to a later motion by the tenant, the judge ordered Davis in mid-November to give the tenant a new key.

Asked to comment on that case, Davis says that the tenant, who had first given her a bad rent check in June 2013, had only just been evicted when she spoke to In These Times on May 23—a sign, the legislator argues, that the system is unfair to landlords.

As Chicago Sun-Times writer Mark Brown has noted, irony abounds in the fact that Davis is herself a delinquent tenant: Her district office is in a building owned by Chicago Public Schools, but Davus has paid no rent for 11 years and is fighting eviction. In 2009, the Chicago Board of Education and Cook County filed suit to recover more than $100,000 in back rent and $456,000 in tax, fees and fines for use of the office, but Davis and the State of Illinois have continued to fight the litigation.

Wall Street 'Repo Men'?

Davis tells In These Times that she decided to introduce the bill after consulting with other local landlords. But as the housing market picks up again and the pace of gentrification in the city quickens, housing activists worry that the bill could have implications beyond the financial interests of legislators and small-time landlords.

Critics of the bill say that it could exacerbate the impact of the foreclosure crisis in an already hard-hit city. Davis, for her part, is quick to emphasize that HB 5395 “has nothing to do with mortgage foreclosures.” But the bill as written would apply to “tenants of single-family or multi-family residential dwellings,” and growing numbers of tenants are living in foreclosed buildings reposessed by banks or acquired by third-party investors, notes the Shriver Center.

In the wake of the foreclosure crisis, as In These Times has reported previously, Wall Street investors have launched a new single-family-home rental empire by gobbling up more than 200,000 homes nationwide. Tenants have reported numerous abuses, including high eviction rates, at the hands of firms seeking to secure returns on their investments. Now, the same investors and hedge funds are setting their sights on multi-family apartment buildings; among them, the private equity giant Blackstone Group, which recently became the largest owner of single-family homes in the U.S., is currently ratcheting up its efforts to acquire distressed multi-family apartment buildings. According to a report in Al Jazeera, renters in such apartment buildings are already reporting abuses at the hands of investors-turned-landlords, who advocates fear are seeking
to force out long-time tenants in order to hike rents.

Shriver Center Director of Housing Kate Walz notes that private eviction enforcers are less likely to be versed in the array of local, state and federal regulations that extend protections to tenants in such foreclosed buildings, potentially creating an atmosphere of confusion that could further abet these abuses. “I can't imagine what will happen when an off-duty cop handles this dicey situation [of determining the rights of tenants in foreclosed buildings], particularly when there may be a [high] volume of evictions,” she says. “This is a dangerous 'repo man' policy being set in motion for residential tenants.”

Rebecca Burns is an In These Times associate editor. Her writing on labor, housing and education has also appeared in Al Jazeera America, Jacobin, Truthout and AlterNet. She can be reached at rebecca[at]inthesetimes.com. Follow her on Twitter @rejburns

Last winter Dart took 6 months to execute an eviction, Thats after the judge gave the tenant 2 months to find a place and after they got 4 months behind. Once the judge issues the order they should be out in a ,matter of weeks not months.Dart is a joke.

Posted by robert Schwartz on 2015-11-24 20:18:09

As landlords we weren't loud enough to demand that this bill pass. The tenants were. Tenants rights have gone too far in this country. No one should be a slumlord. But tenants now can live in a place 6 months rent free and then go on and find some other sucker to live off of rent free. If the government is so concerned about these people, they should pay their back rent while the issue is being resolved. They should pay the mortgage and all the bills that we have to pay if they are so concerned about these tenants being homeless.

Posted by Sophia33 on 2015-08-23 01:00:00

Currently, Cook County laws fail landlords 100%. It is useless to be a landlord in Cook county. I am a landlord, and I support the bill 100%. Bad tenants can go to court, delay courts months and months """LEGALLY""", and not paying their rent, use the heat and water free, damage your property in front of your eyes, and you still need to pay cook county their tax, water bills, mortgage bills, and you can do nothing to that.. After the many months court delay, The Cook county eviction sherrif fails landlords again by months of waiting for your turn (yes, you are paying your many bills, and not collecting rent). If your case got stuck in winter, forget it, it takes months to evict the tenants, and after 4 months, Tenants can file a motion to stop temporary the eviction. and start all over again the pain process. One other thing, 90% of landlords are not rich. many of them got stuck in this business because they can't sell their under water property.... Peace of mind, get out of renting business, unless you are a handyman, have a lot of free time, Screen potential tenants & have a dirty mouth, or let a management company take care of this.

Posted by adam on 2015-03-20 15:10:55

This is a local Chicago story, but it is symptomatic of a kind of mean spirited cruel vicious ugly and downright evil attitude/trend in American politics/policy.

If passed, this policy/law will kill people. There will be overt violence as situations escalate and people are driven to crazy desperate measures. Some will just suffer and die without making much of a fuss. Families will be broken up, children will suffer. Lives will be ruined.

And for what? So one greedy self serving hypocritical landlord who wrote the law to enrich herself can make more money...and so Chicago can more quickly gentrify.

This law amounts to a kind of slow motion genocide against the poor, that's how evil it is.

Shame on Rep. Monique D. Davis...if there is a hell for greedy hypocrites then she will certainly make the grade....and shame on ANYONE who votes to pass this vicious inhumane un-Godly malevolent cruel and unusually sadistic legislation.

Posted by Nick_Lento on 2014-06-02 07:15:42

When are we going to put an end to the corporate stranglehold on us?When will we enact emergency laws guaranteeing a roof over everyone's head?Our fearless leaders won't do this on their own; they'll have to be FORCED to do it.One way to do this without getting your head bashed in is to simply not show up for work.This will take something we haven't done since the Vietnam war, getting together by the millions in a cooperative effort to show the powers that be who REALLY has the power when aroused.

Posted by willymack on 2014-05-31 21:11:28

hey Ill, you keep these nitwits in office then you deserve to have them keep screwing you

Posted by lilbear68 on 2014-05-29 15:30:11

If the state wants to screw the poor, the unemployed and the out of luck like this then I figure it'd be a great way to use these private evictions to train drive by shooters. They want war...give them war.